The biggest losers of the start of the NHL season are undoubtedly the many college and junior teams that won’t have the benefit of NHL players skating with them at practice. It must have been incredible to skate alongside real NHLers, participating in drills with them, working out with them, and seeing exactly how much better they are than you.

The largest mass assemblage of Vancouver Canucks during the lockout skated with the UBC Thunderbirds, along with sundry other NHLers and free agents, even playing a charity shinny game against the college team as Bieksa’s Buddies. I have reason to believe that the Thunderbirds were grateful to the Canucks for the time they spent skating with them. That reason? They made a video stating that they were grateful to the Canucks for the time they spent skating with them. I’m pretty quick on picking up things like that.

Every single player on the Thunderbirds got a chance to express their thanks, which was a good move by UBC, as some of them are absolutely hilarious.

If you’ve watched a lot of programs with witches (Charmed, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, et al), you may be familiar with the concept of the 24-hour spell.

The 24-hour spell is a mystical occurrence, something that happens to drastically change someone’s fate for exactly one day. Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s bad, but either way, it usually serves to give somebody a special perspective he wouldn’t otherwise be able to experience. It could be a body swap. It could be a sudden aging of thirty years. It could be temporary magical powers. Whatever it is, it lasts exactly 24 hours, and then, the moment time is up — zap! — everything switches back to normal (or, in the case of Groundhog Day’s 24-hour spell, it starts over again).

I bring this up because we witnessed a perfectly-timed 24-hour spell this weekend in the Canucks’ crease. You could be upset about how this weekend’s set went. Or you could marvel at the fact that you saw magic happen.

Sometimes when there’s a lot to talk about in the world of Canucks hockey, our employers at the Vancouver Sun will send the in-house video team outside to get some fan insight on the chatter of the day, and considering the inflammatory events of the Canucks’ home opener, Sunday night was one such time. Sun videographer Mark Yuen — director of viral sensation “Call the Union” — was dispatched to Rogers Arena to capture fan sentiment regarding the Canucks’ goaltending controversy.

But instead, Yuen captured something a little more unique. During an interview with a Canucks fan in an orange tuque, a family of three passed by. The interview was interrupted when the father, who was pushing a stroller with a kid in it and obviously didn’t have his eyes on the road, walked the stroller directly into a lamppost.

On Saturday night, the Hockey Night in Canada crew couldn’t stop debating the debacle in the Canucks’ crease and I repeatedly heard them say that Alain Vigneault should “stick with the gameplan” and start Cory Schneider against the Edmonton Oilers. Vigneault only half-listened. He stuck with the gameplan, which happened to be to start Roberto Luongo on the second night of a back-to-back.

In fact, what if all of this has been the gameplan, a complicated scheme to completely depreciate the trade value of both goaltenders so that Gillis is unable to trade either one this season, thereby giving Vigneault the benefit of two great goaltenders heading into the playoffs. If so, that’s a stupid gameplan and he should stop sticking to it immediately. I watched this game.

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